Peelle, Elizabeth

ORAL HISTORY OF ELIZABETH PEELLE
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
February 23, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: I am Keith McDaniel and today is February the 23rd, 2010. I am here with Elizabeth Peelle at the Midtown Community Center here in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Peelle, tell me a little bit about – how did you come to Oak Ridge? How did you end up in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Peelle: I came clutching my new bachelor’s degree in Chemistry to work as a chemist at the K-25 plant in 1954. In fact, it was the summer of 1954 and it was the monumental – not for that event, but before, because of the Brown versus Board of Education decision brought down by the Supreme Court, I believe in May of 1954, had a lot of bearing to do with some of our later activities here in the city.
Mr. McDaniel: Now where did you come from?
Mrs. Peelle: I was born in Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Went to school in Ohio, Western College for Women and graduated there in 1954.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came to Oak Ridge to work at K-25 in 1954?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How did that come about? How did that – how did you find out about the job?
Mrs. Peelle: Well in that period in the 1950s, we were all learning about nuclear energy and nuclear power, and as a high school science student, chemistry/physics major then, it was very exciting to be thinking about atoms and what they were doing and nuclear energy in general. There was a real romance about the whole nuclear business. This was to be the front edge, the leading edge of science. So going to Oak Ridge was already something I knew about in high school, and of the jobs that I had offered to me at the end of my graduation in ’54, one was to have gone with “Generous” Electric [laughter] or GM Foods in Ohio and the other was to come to Oak Ridge. So that wasn’t any contest for me.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you came to Oak Ridge, were you single?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. I lived in Batavia Hall right across the street from Jackson – in Jackson Square, 111 Batavia Hall. It’s now the big parking lot for our only skyscraper.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. What was it like being here in ’54 and being single and right out of college in an exciting new job?
Mrs. Peelle: Well I came without a car. So I had one of these many dorm rooms and found myself – I used the AIT public transit system out to K-25 and I walked the city for entertainment. I learned when – every night or evening after work, if I didn’t go swimming in the brand new pool, then I would walk the streets of Oak Ridge way over to the East End, and I knew every street there and many of the byways by the time the first year was over.
Mr. McDaniel: So you walked a lot then didn’t you?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: All over town. So you were – now what did you do at K-25?
Mrs. Peelle: I was a chemist and I did low temperature gas absorption work which was really working on the nickel barriers.
Mr. McDaniel: So that was in 1954. Then tell me a little bit about your life after you came here. I mean what happened over the next few years and –
Mrs. Peelle: Since I got tired of public transportation – in fact they were already closing down some of the public things – the city was managed by the Atomic Energy Commission through its local contractor, the MSI Services – I found a carpool and was driving out to work with them. I was – as a rider, though, since I still had no vehicle. There was a very active singles community. In fact, everyone was young. We – I found a church home very soon in the – with – our group was meeting in one of the few public spaces in the city, which was in the green room in Jackson Square immediately adjacent to the public library. I became active in that church, and after a year I decided – I’m kind of a slow learner, but I finally figured out that there was not going to be much advancement for women in the K-25 operation. I was getting ready to take off and go back to graduate school when a friend, a mutual friend said, “I’ve got this guy you need to meet soon,” but it never happened and I was getting ready to leave. So finally my friend hurried up, and it turns out that Bob was working at Neutron Physics Division at the lab and finishing his thesis. He was an ABD from Princeton and of course his being hired was contingent upon completing that. Anyway, we met in March of 1955 and in a couple of months decided to get married. We were married in September, 1955 back at the wonderful French modeled chapel on the campus, and we moved back here and set up shop in his Garden Apartment at that time. We lived there for the first ten years of our marriage.
Mr. McDaniel: So you met him in ’55 and got married and decided to stay here?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you both decided to stay here?
Mrs. Peelle: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So did you go – so were you still working at K-25 or did you –
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. I worked there for the first four years and then decided – by that time, we were being already involved in the newly formed first interracial group in the city, the Community Relations Council and we had monthly meetings in which the black residents would come. Most of them were janitors and maids because in fact there were only three job categories open for blacks in the city at that time. This was kind of old army camp. Brilliant leading edge science, but we were kind of backward in having been an army camp since the beginning of the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I was just double checking here just to make sure everything was going well. With the monitor on the other side sometimes I have to do that. So coming to Tennessee, let’s talk about that a little bit. Was that a culture shock for you?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Well tell me a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: But of course, this was not standard Tennessee. This was a boom town and an old army camp. In fact, the city had the Clinton Engineer Works which was the nom de plume by which this was known or – not to say – Oak Ridge was not set up until ’42, ’43. So in the city, we lived with people who had come from all over the country to work here and with many of the craftspeople and laborer people being local or at least Tennessee or from the South, but the scientific community was largely from out-of-state, so it was very cosmopolitan in the friendships we made. But then we discovered this strange – the old army camp thing – as how they affected the other half of the population, which was black. Most blacks had been brought in on labor trains from the Deep South. Many of them were near illiterate. These were from Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama. So when we discovered the labeled white and colored water fountains out at work and separate time clocks for union people, black or white – so of course separate bathrooms, certainly. The main problem we saw in the city was that though the schools had been integrated in the fall of 1955, a year after Brown versus – by the order of the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], that extended only to the high school and that – we heard accounts of the concerns of our friends as well as others. There was a lot of tension on the opening day at Oak Ridge High, but with adults standing around, some of them very unhappy and a few making threatening noises, but they knew better than to get too far out of line or their jobs, they figured, might be at stake. But out of that group, we began organizing monthly meetings to educate ourselves, and we knew that the local public services, the public ones like the library, of course, were open, but very little else was. There were no – blacks could eat at lunch counters sometimes, especially if they went to the backdoor as they did at the White – I can’t think of the name. It’s escaped me – the “White House”? The “White Angel”? Down on the turnpike. I’ll correct that when the name comes back to me.
Mr. McDaniel: The Snow White –
Mrs. Peelle: Snow White.
Mr. McDaniel: The Snow White Restaurant?
Mrs. Peelle: Snow White Restaurant and even the Oak Terrace Dining Hall run by Roscoe Stevens out at Grove Center would not serve blacks.
Mr. McDaniel: Really? What about the – now by this time were the cafeterias still going, the army cafeterias or had they already been shut down?
Mrs. Peelle: Well we had –
Mr. McDaniel: Or turned over to private?
Mrs. Peelle: The Oak Ridge Mall developed downtown in 1955 as a strip mall and Davis Cafeteria and McCrory’s, Walgreens were all there and served food. It’s just that they wouldn’t serve blacks.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about your work and what you did to desegregate the town and to – and the businesses?
Mrs. Peelle: Well they’re really separate. I operated a mercury manometer, the air columns, and a lot of L28 with the liquid nitrogen, that surrounded these tubes, premade tubes that we dealt with that had what was nickel barrier in them, though I think it was – we knew but were not supposed to publicize what this was we were working on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But it was the barrier material for K-25?
Mrs. Peelle: We would measure the absorption of L28 on the – within these tubes. Of course the tubes looked mostly all the same but there were different types of barriers in them and different amounts of chemicals in them. So we made measurements and when we had a mercury spill, which is quite possible with dealing with mercury manometers we – even at that era, ’54 to ’58 when I worked there, we would all have to evacuate the room until it was cleaned up. There were apparently not nearly so many precautions taken using mercury which was going on simultaneously at Y-12, and ended up, as you have probably heard, with I don’t know how many hundreds of tons of mercury in White Oak Creek that came into town and flowed through it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. So let’s go back to your work in the desegregating, the group that you were working with. Talk a little bit about some of the things that you folks initiated and worked through.
Mrs. Peelle: We decided being very – we were so naïve. We decided we’d better educate ourselves, and of course the basic premise was that of academic people. Surely if people knew what was going on, they would be agreeable to changing it because it was not fair to have half of the population be unable to go to the bowling alleys or to the movies or to the sit-ins, to the lunch counters, or even many stores would really not allow blacks in them. Of course they had to – blacks had to go out of town to get a haircut. The main thing we learned, though, was the Scarboro School and how – the extraordinary history of education for blacks in Oak Ridge. During the war, black workers were told not to bring their children, to leave them at home because the army didn’t want to fiddle with having desegregation – segregated – dealing with black education at all. The housing for blacks was very strange and substandard. There were buildings known as hutments, which were really just four walls, no – a door and no windows but you could lift up one side to get some ventilation – no screens either – and a coal stove in the middle. At one point, the AEC through MSI was renting four corners of a hutment to four different people if you were black.
Mr. McDaniel: I believe those were 16x16.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes and four people lived in them.
Mrs. Peelle: Four people. Each one had a corner. Blacks we knew – since there were two or three professional blacks and that was all, they took to renting rooms in Knoxville to keep their things, because there was no privacy. There were no lockers. There was nothing. Of course, some people brought their children anyway. It’s just that they learned to hide under the hutments or under the flattop housing which existed in the Woodland area and in much of what is now I think the city park around the Civic Center.
Mr. McDaniel: Also many of the men, married men were separated from their wives.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. There were some.
Mr. McDaniel: So let’s talk a little bit about the transition of desegregation in the city and what you and your group’s involvement was there.
Mrs. Peelle: We negotiated, attempted to educate. We invited the personnel and in fact the top managers of some of the plants to come in and talk with us about employment opportunities and employment arrangements. How come there were these separate fountains and separate restrooms and separate time clocks and why weren’t there any professional blacks? Logan Emlett came, I remember, to one of our meetings. We negotiated with Roscoe Stevens of the Oak Terrace, telling him that we would be glad to support and give – we would be glad to organize to show positive support by many white people because all the business people had the same complaint. They said, “If we serve blacks, we’ll lose business. Nobody else will come.” Many of our efforts were devoted to right there, at that nexus. The techniques we used were generally to show public support, white support for opening the facilities. We would issue tickets to people. We had programs trying within one exploratory barbershop that we would arrange – we would urge white people to attend the barbershop for a month’s trial especially from – and with a little card that said, “I would – thank you. I would support opening this facility to everyone.” Then doing trials, etc. None of that worked.
Mr. McDaniel: None of that worked. This was probably what? The late ’50s?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes, and barbershops were the last holdouts. So in the history papers, memo that I published here, it’s a history of segregation, 1943 to 1960, which in fact was one of our organizing tools while we were watching sit-ins and other efforts by blacks to be admitted to services elsewhere in the South. That was one of our final efforts to be – have some documentation to show City Council, to show business people, to show the public that – what the history had been. I do want to speak about one of the most extraordinary things on education that we applied for blacks that we found when we got here, and that was we had an operating volunteer high school for Scarboro people that was accredited by the state. I was never a part of this. I just learned about it after I came, which blew me away. We had – in that high school, subjects taught included physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, English, history, etc., and we – that group which I learned about really only afterwards – there are half a dozen people and some of them still living who were volunteer teachers for that effort. Finally, the school system hired two additional staff persons to legitimate. This was a volunteer, accredited high school because there was no school for blacks except to ride a bus into Knoxville to go to East High there. Most of them didn’t [return to school] once they left Scarboro School. There are also many other interesting stories about Mrs. Officer. Arizona Officer was her name, the teacher, principal, educator who was brought in by the AEC immediately post-war because the army decided, “Well now I suppose we have to settle down and offer some schooling for blacks,” which we had not done. Her husband, Robert Officer, was the sixth grade teacher. I got to know her quite well and found she was an extraordinary person among the stories we got from her and from other residents of Scarboro. By this time there was – Scarboro had been developed separately on new land on the south side of Illinois Avenue, and there was a community, an isolated community built there with real housing even though many of them had only one door or a few other things that wouldn’t have been tolerated elsewhere. To recruit children for the school, Mrs. Officer found that she had to – since children who had lived there during the war were, of course, not able to go to school and they and their parents adopted various schemes that the children would go hide when any white people appeared, so Mrs. Officer found herself down on her hands and knees sometimes crawling under trailers to coax the children to come out so they could be registered to go to school.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Let’s pause for just a second. I’m going to check this.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Peelle: I would like to talk about the Scarboro dump also.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let’s talk about that next. Tell me about the Scarboro dump.
Mrs. Peelle: As we were having these meetings on a regular basis with the Community Relations Council we heard – made friends with, of course, and began to hear stories from the blacks who came to the meetings about what their life was like and one of the big complaints was that the dump, the city dump was in Scarboro and that it burned irregularly. This was causing fumes and it was really not a very nice place. It wouldn’t have been tolerated probably in any of the white areas. So the – I was the Social Action Chair at that point in my church, the Unitarian Church, and we had black members who helped provide us with more information and we decided to go as a church group to what functioned as the city organization still run by AEC and ask about this and request some changes. So we did, including – we took along – one of our members was Bill Scott who was the Recreation Director for the city of Oak Ridge. We didn’t have a city yet, but we called ourselves a city. We didn’t become incorporated until 1959. We went on the dump issue to the MSI offices and talked to Fred – Ed Puscas who was the Director of the Public Health Section. After we got to be a city, the powers that be decided we didn’t need public health anymore; it would be provided by the County. But we had a public health officer of our own, and we explained the problem as seen by the residents of Scarboro. Bill Scott provided a lot of additional details. Puscas, unlike most of our other efforts, Puscas said, “Well that sounds like a serious problem. I’m going to look into this and see if we can’t move the dump and upgrade it.” At the time he said, “Well there’s not supposed to be any fires there.” But the residents would say, “How often have you been out to Scarboro to look and smell?” So the – in due time, I think in less than a year that was all accomplished. Not only did the dump close in Scarboro but a modern landfill was opened on land outside of the city in Anderson County and upgraded to a landfill. So that was one of our first successes.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Let’s move on to the ’60s and the early ’60s. Talk a little bit about the junior high desegregation. As you said, the high school was desegregated in ’55 in Oak Ridge but there were probably lots of other events leading up to the mid ’60s.
Mrs. Peelle: The desegregation was ordered for the high school but not for the rest of the system. In fact, I opted out of most of the ’60s because I was finishing my dissertation, this little fourteen page history set my thesis back by about – I hate to tell you, but it was four or five months doing the research for it and interviewing the seventy-five people who contributed to it. So by the time I finished my thesis, I had two small children. In fact, I never went to my own graduation because Annette was born three days before. So what I heard about this, however, was quite spectacular and there were four or more mothers of black middle school junior high mothers who got involved and said they didn’t like the plan that was finally put forth by the city to just desegregate one of the junior highs and one of the elementary schools, sending all of the students from Scarboro school which was then closed – and there’s several sad stories about that – sending all of them to a very few schools. They wanted it distributed throughout. There was much discussion and there were many other actors. In fact we saw our first outside groups, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and others appeared. That’s how the CRC [Community Relations Council] got to become respectable. We were a very – in the years we operated, which was ’56 to ’62, such as the newspaper, the citizens really looked on this, well, our meetings as being very controversial.
Mr. McDaniel: Kind of a radical, fringe group.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes and there were kind of nasty things written about some of the individuals. “These women don’t shave their legs. I mean, this is really bad,” said Gene O’Bleness of the WATO Station. So we were – they were sure that – some people were sure this was a communist enclave naturally. However, when the ’60s really got going and we had our own demonstrations led by blacks and organized by blacks in our Downtown area – Davis Brothers Cafeteria, and McCrory’s, and Walgreens – and when SNCC organized it – that was the Southern Christian Leadership Council, I guess, and many of the other black organized groups, and a few of them showed up, why suddenly we became very respectable.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Of course.
Mrs. Peelle: It was not an overnight transition, but in this process I remember the four mothers who specifically did most of the heavy work. They moved most of the dirt, and eventually they – it came out that there was a bussing system developed to distribute black students to all the elementary schools and both of the junior highs because Robertsville was going to be the only one. This took some intervention by some of the mothers when things were moving very slowly. At one point they appealed to the Federal Department of Housing and we had such people come to town, which was really quite a radical idea that another federal agency would show up here, even though by that time we were a new city. So the people whose names I remember – I knew all of them but I can only remember three names lately were Jackie Holloway, who is still here in the city, Kathleen Stevens, who has died since, Cele Meyer, who is a white woman and had teenagers – and there was at least a fourth one but the name escapes me. I can perhaps fill it in later.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: Eventually they won and that desegregation occurred. I can’t tell you exactly when since I was busy, very busy at that point raising small children.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s talk a little bit about the – you have a very interesting story about the barbershops and kind of last holdout of the whole getting a segregated barber here. So tell me a little bit about that story.
Mrs. Peelle: So this had a lot to do – I initiated some of this but most was carried out by men, of course. After I had recovered somewhat and my children were a little older, I came up for air about 1968 [coughs] looked around and said, “Where are we on the desegregation? Is everything done? The movies and the Laundromats?” Much of that was done. We had done picketing at the Laundromat in Jefferson Circle. We had marched when the Klan announced they were going to be here. We checked everything with the police and decided – in that case our first daughter was three months old. That took some real soul searching to decide to carry her on my back as I went on the one side of the street. The police arranged to separate the two groups. The Klan marched on one side of the street and we marched on the other and we had great confidence and had conferred all the time whenever we did anything that might have caused upset. So those things were behind us. There are many wonderful stories that others would need to tell you about how they integrated the Skyway, the outdoor drive-in movie, the bowling alleys and other things and even the Laundromats. All these things had happened in the ’60s except the barbershops. So when I came up for air and looked around that’s what was left. So I said, “Well,” and talked to the male members of our groups and blacks and whites whom I knew by this time, said, “We ought to have a barbershop committee.” We called the first meeting, and the chair people were in turn Bill Johnson, Bill – I’m blocking on it – and my husband. There were three people who became chair of that. It took several tries, because in talking with the barbershops, these men were all area people. They were practically all Southern. They told us they didn’t know how to cut that kind of hair. Some of them – those were the civil talks when we – people would go in to discuss it, there was a lot of other language sometimes used. So a program of testing sending in one white and one black together began at all the shops along with discussion. I know my Bob’s – my husband’s testing partner was – sorry about the senior moments.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s okay.
Mrs. Peelle: Willie someone. He was a custodian at the – for the city and a person who always was elegantly groomed and dressed. So he and my [husband] – and Bob would go in sometimes together, sometimes Bob first and the other. Meanwhile we’d be having a goodwill policy saying that, “We will support you if you open.” That wasn’t good enough. So for one of them, we said, “We’ll have – will you consider opening if we show you that there is a clientele that will support you?” This guy said yes. So we had a – we gave tickets. We organized teams and sent him maybe fifty extra customers in that one month period. Then the time of testing came and he refused service. So we had – there were a number of such episodes, some of which are detailed in the green sheets that I have appended to my history. Finally, we decided nothing was working and we decided we’d have to set up our own barbershop, which we did. One of the members of our committee had a brother-in-law who had just finished barber school up in Kentucky and we went into discussions whether he would move to Oak Ridge and what sort of support we should give to help with the transition. We sold tickets. They were good for a year and people would go – we sold them in advance so that we had the money and we could turn over the money and people would go and patronize. That barbershop is still working today. It’s Ken’s Barbershop in Jackson Square.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? That’s what I was about to ask where that is. So that was the �� that was set up specifically for both black and white men to have their hair cut?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. Men or women it turns out that –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Peelle: It just galled me that residents of the city would have to go elsewhere, go out of town, Knoxville, Oliver Springs, wherever, to get a haircut. It seemed that we weren’t a complete city until we really could say and show that we did offer equal services to anybody who was –
Mr. McDaniel: When was – was that established in ’68 or –
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So it opened in ’68?
Mrs. Peelle: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did the other barbers follow through?
Mrs. Peelle: Oh no.
Mr. McDaniel: No?
Mrs. Peelle: I think some with time [coughs] – excuse me – with time and things that were changing elsewhere there of course were many foreign visitors to Oak Ridge. I think some of them went to other barbershops because this campaign even today is not known by most of the city of Oak Ridge what the history of Ken’s Barbershop is. Many of those who helped set it up are no longer with us. So foreign visitors to the lab who maybe lived here for a summer or a couple years, I’m sure they tried out these places but I don’t have a clear memory. I suspect some of them probably got service but I don’t really know.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well that’s an amazing story. Let’s move on to the – you have here “becoming a real city, the incorporation and cemesto sales.” If you want to talk about that a little bit we can. We’ve got a lot of that covered with some other folks but if you were – if there was some involvement that you had that you’d like to talk about, feel free.
Mrs. Peelle: Our involvement was just as citizens. We’re not part of any organization dealing with this. We were in favor of having a city even though there were many people who thought, “No, no. It was a bad idea. Oak Ridge would never thrive.” But the gates had already been taken down in ’49, but it was still – it wasn’t until ’59 that we got to be a city. “Oh the problem of housing. What will we do with that?” Since people rented – no one owned their homes at that point. People rented cemestos and the new housing in East and West Village, Title 7 or whatever it was, but we were not – we were only citizens acting. We were not part of any organization at that time.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, you did help and establish the Oak Ridge campus of Roane State and implementing the Oak Ridge Vision for Higher Education.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes, that was –
Mr. McDaniel: Talk a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: That’s the development and the formation of ORCHE, Oak Ridge Citizens for Higher Ed, education. It had been a long time dream of many people in the city that we – Oak Ridge ought to have a college. In fact we had raised money, I think as much as – I don’t know how many thousands of dollars. It was quite a few for that era and hired an organizer and trying to gin up the College of Oak Ridge, but unfortunately all these efforts fizzled out or failed.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let me adjust something real quick and then we’ll continue. Sure. I remember hearing something about the College of Oak Ridge. I certainly do. But it just never really got off the ground.
Mrs. Peelle: It never got off the ground, even though there was an office here for a year or more for the College of Oak Ridge, but it didn’t come together.
Mr. McDaniel: About what year was that? Do you remember?
Mrs. Peelle: I was trying to think for sure. I’m not sure. I think it was the late ’90s, mid or late ’90s but we can find out about that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: But meanwhile the community college had been organized and built in Roane County, one of our adjacent counties. As I’m sure you know, Oak Ridge – one precinct of Oak Ridge is part of Roane County, but the College, the original Roane State College exists in Harriman and is supported very broadly by the Roane County establishment.
Mr. McDaniel: That was opened in the early ’70s?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mrs. Peelle: So in the meanwhile there was an outpost from Roane State started here in Oak Ridge. In fact it was extremely popular.
Mr. McDaniel: At the old Fairview School wasn’t it? Fairmont – what was the –
Mrs. Peelle: The old Paragon. Well that’s getting ahead of the story though. The – I don’t know the exact history, though it is – it can be found. There was a great pent up demand for community college courses here onsite. So pretty soon there were a large number of – there was no place, however, to hold them. So classes were held in churches, in communities, community centers, here in the Wildcat Den, all over town. At one point we counted there were thirteen locations, including broom closets.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mrs. Peelle: But there was a hard row to go here. First of all, there was never enough money. Roane State, Oak Ridge was seriously constrained even though they had students and enrollments coming out the ears. They were not funded enough to do much of this because in part there was great concern over in the rest of Roane County that Oak Ridge was going to take over Roane State, and they weren’t about to have this. They were very proud of Roane State. So this kind of – the climate of wonderful acceptance and many, many students, too many students and where to put them was growing on us here. Over some years and there was a local dentist who was on the higher Tennessee – Tennessee Higher Education Commission who was never very – somehow never very enthusiastic about the idea of an Oak Ridge version or venture into Roane State. So there were hard times here. In the process – this went on for some period. I can’t tell you just how long but I’m sure all of the rest of that is in the Roane State archives. At some point, the establishment in Oak Ridge – monies came due for buildings from the Higher Education – TDIC. Tennessee has this strange system of two commissions, one of which manages UT and the others manage the community colleges. There had just been moves, I believe, to integrate that a little more closely, but at this time that’s what we were faced with. A package of money came through to Roane County for Roane State, Oak Ridge, but people had different views of what should happen for that. Meanwhile, our committee – and I’ll tell you about its formation in a minute – had been going to Roane State talking with the presidents, Cuyler Dunbar and –
Mr. McDaniel: Sherry Hoppe?
Mrs. Peelle: Sherry Hoppe –
Mr. McDaniel: Sherry Hoppe.
Mrs. Peelle: – and we were meeting with them frequently. We would document the number of students there were who couldn’t – who would try to enroll but couldn’t, were turned away because there wasn’t enough space. We took questionnaires as to how many students would like – what were they looking for here in Oak Ridge. We published the numbers as to how many students served and underserved there were. When this bucket of – what turned the tide was this bucket of money they intended for Roane State Oak Ridge for a permanent building. The powers that be decided there was really no need for a Roane State venture in Oak Ridge and, gee, we could have – by giving our money, giving Roane State’s money, Roane County’s money to Knoxville, and we could have a really good Pellissippi campus and that was only six miles away. That was how things were going when some of us decided, “Hey wait a minute.” [laughs] So we formed ORCHE, Oak Ridge Citizens for Higher Ed because we felt this was an outrage, really. We felt the need had been demonstrated and the money was for a Roane State operation. It was not for Knoxville. But this was the era of – the beginning era of, “Let’s have cooperation between Oak Ridge and reduce its isolation and let’s” – we’d be co-partnering with Knoxville and the surrounding areas better than we have. Somehow they always left Roane County out of that. But that’s another story. So they were getting ready. This included a local banker in the Chamber of Commerce, at least one local banker and others who were – had already voted to give Roane State’s money to Knoxville. So ORCHE was formed on the – and there – our one real feature that kept us going for years was Wayne Clark’s offer of land in Oak Ridge for Roane State. This was by the powers that be kind of (a) derided and (b) not listened to. This had been – Wayne had made these offers, apparently, a number of times. I was a member of the committee of fifty at that point set up by Representative Marilyn Lloyd in the ’80s to think about the future of Oak Ridge and so on. For some reason, we were having outreach and there was a meeting called at the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which no longer exists, some building over in the east end of Oak Ridge, on what people would like to see for Oak Ridge. Wayne Clark got up in that meeting – many other ideas were being talked about and said, well, it was a matter of great distress to him personally that City Council and the powers that be in the city were not receptive to his offers of land for a Roane site, for a Roane State College of Oak Ridge and citing – we all knew about the unmet dream of having a College of Oak Ridge. So he made this statement at the meeting that I was chairing. I called a meeting of people who were interested in higher ed in Oak Ridge and particularly in Wayne’s offer, and seeing what we could do to reverse or, shall we say, get some citizen input to this decision that had been made and was being implemented by bankers and the Chamber of Commerce, giving away our bucket of money. So this is – we hung on for years doing – gathering more information and having these surveys of students and meeting with students, meeting with faculty, meeting with Sherry Hoppe and Pat Rush joined our group. She was a councilwoman, elected councilwoman at that point. We were trying to figure out what we could do to move – see that those monies didn’t get spent, didn’t get given to Knoxville but were spent here in Oak Ridge and how could we do it. Finally, we made enough noise and the enrollments continued to boom every time that the state would give just a little more. “Well you could have another fifteen students in the nursing program,” whatever, why enrollments would boom and there was always this waiting list. Finally, the Paragon Health Club there on the east turnpike was up for sale and we hatched the idea of maybe the city would like to rent that for a year, just make a trial of this. There was a lot of politicking went on which I wasn’t necessarily involved in, but our committee in the – you should interview the few remaining members including Burt Chappell who was our chairperson of that committee. Pat Rush is apparently very elderly and I’m not sure she can –
Mr. McDaniel: Pat is on –
Mrs. Peelle: Is she?
Mr. McDaniel: She’s an immediate scheduled. We’re trying to schedule her now.
Mrs. Peelle: Ask her about Roane. Ask her about ORCHE and how we got Roane State. Eventually the – things were coming to a head also with the mall in difficulty and the owner of the strip mall – there was a group coming in from Pennsylvania who wanted to take over the mall, force out the existing thing, and they had bought some land right in – near Jefferson Junior High. That land came into question for, you know, would that be a suitable site. But we did finally get the City Council to begin renting the Paragon building. Of course, when Roane State was given that offer, they immediately filled it up and needed more, but they had a place then where they could meet other than in broom closets and in thirteen other locations. From that point on, the idea began to gather steam. There were still a lot of rough spots which I’m not going to go into here, but we enlarged our committee and eventually it became the thing to do when the Coffeys and McNallys decided that it should go. Coffey’s generous gift of some millions of dollars cemented it in place. By then we were respectable. It was okay. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Once again, you’re group was respectable.
Mrs. Peelle: Well this is a completely different group.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly.
Mrs. Peelle: Finally, the power structure took it over and it went. We raised several million dollars here to match the Coffey funds and Roane State has prospered and has become really a vital part, I think, of the city. In fact, I don’t understand why the City Council delays funding of the next building program at Roane State. They can spend all this money on IDB junkets and the one institution in the city that is positive and provides opportunities and from which with Sherry Hoppe’s leadership we now have five satellite places as well and distance learning – there have been a lot of innovations been done and we hope that they’ll be welcomed and recognized more fully, for that I think is the wonderful work that has been going on there at Roane State, Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Very good. All right. Let me change tapes and we will move on.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s talk just a little bit about the creating the first west end greenbelt. Tell me a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: Well there’s – by now life had gone on. We were well established and happy Oak Ridgers, but we had occasion to – since we like the outdoors and since we have a national historic walking trail along the crest of Oak Ridge – to rue the fact that there were no city greenbelts beyond Illinois Avenue. None in the entire West End. Unlike the war time era, when, you may be aware that the greenbelts that occurred were in part a necessity because all the heavy dirt moving equipment for making houses was at play and in use at the plants. So Skidmore, Merrill & Owens laid out a city plan that created forested and “unused areas” between the major road system of Oak Ridge which has led to many beautiful walkways, as I learned in my first year here in Oak Ridge when I walked every street repeatedly. So down the West End – and by now, Bob and I lived in Roane County, Oak Ridge out on Oklahoma Avenue. Suddenly there wasn’t – and we were enjoying the de facto woods and being right next to the AEC fence and areas that were not used.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sorry. Could you – do you need that paper that you have in your hand?
Mrs. Peelle: No, I don’t.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. The microphone’s picking up the rattling a little bit.
Mrs. Peelle: Sorry.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right. So you were living on Oklahoma.
Mrs. Peelle: So we’re living on Oklahoma, and suddenly the developers had a plan for developing an erstwhile green – what was our de facto greenbelt between Oklahoma and Nebraska. It’s specifically between Oklahoma and Newell Lane, for instance. The plan there was to put in seventy-two houses in that enclave with grades for the school bus and other vehicles of up to fifteen percent beyond that, which was allowed in the city development plan. There was an immediately formed opposition group. I know about opposition groups. It’s in my work as an environmental sociologist working on – I’ve worked with and studied professionally nimbi groups and been involved in siting nuclear power plants, coal plants, nuclear waste facilities, hazardous waste and so on. There are many citizen efforts to revise it, mainly to be involved in the decision making. But suddenly in Oak Ridge here there was a big effort formed to stop that development. We succeeded, and of course then I had buyer’s remorse as a professional, and I said, “Well, we ought to make something good come out of this.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: We talked Ridge Realty, which was the development company, into maybe dividing up those – that seventy-plus acres into large baby farm areas but without cutting down the trees, farms without trees. They did and began selling them. At this point, we studied those maps since we are adjacent to that area. Someone hatched the idea that, “Wouldn’t part of that make a nice greenbelt?” But then the problem was, “How in the world do we get a greenbelt now?” There hadn’t been any formed deliberately in Oak Ridge. What we had as greenbelts was an artifact of how the city was built and the fact that big bulldozers weren’t available to level every lot and cut down every tree before you started. So we hatched an idea, and Grant Stradley, our neighbor on Oklahoma and I conferred with many others and decided we would try to organize collecting money from the people, especially those adjacent to the seventeen acre park that we picked out which went right through the throat of the valley, Oklahoma avenue over to Newell. It was the largest plot. Most of the plots were seven, ten acres and there are eight of them in that area. This big one hadn’t sold yet. It cost forty-two thousand dollars, according to Ridge Realty. So what we did was assess all the home owners whose property immediately adjoined that as well as everybody else in the neighborhood. We asked for five hundred dollars from each of the home owners whose immediate property values would be enhanced by having a permanent greenbelt. Though our – Stradley’s parcel was within that area, I think, but ours – the Peelle’s at the top of the hill at 13 Oklahoma was not, and we even solicited all the other people in the immediate area. We, I think, kicked in five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, though we were not directly in this, and many of the people who lived on the old Oak Hills area, which is Oklahoma, Mason Lane, Westover, and Wildwood, many of those kicked in large amounts of money. We finally raised twenty-two thousand dollars back in the early ’80s – this is 1982 – and decided that was about as much as we could get, but that was roughly half the price that Ridge Realty Company had set for that parcel. So we went to City Council with our money and we said, “Will you match this so we can – and declare this as greenbelt?” That’s how we – they did and that’s how we got the first greenbelt in – by public/private funding –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: – in the entire western part of Oak Ridge. Unfortunately, we don’t have a policy of requiring developers to set aside land. Usually that – even out in the county they frequently ask a developer to set aside a place for a school. So that hasn’t happened in the West End, and certainly not for parks. So I was always very proud of that one event, giving back to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s move on to the MRS and the Joint City/Roane County Task Force. Talk a little bit about that and your involvement with that.
Mrs. Peelle: I feel that the MRS Task Force and how it operated –
Mr. McDaniel: MRS stood for –
Mrs. Peelle: Stood for Monitored Retrievable Storage. The proposal was from the Department of Energy to – when they were running into heavy water around the – no pun intended – around the country in plans and places and how to store high level nuclear waste, what could we do with it? The Yucca Mountain site and WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] were being delayed. This was in the ’80s, the time period that the agreements that had been made with the utilities and the government long ago that they would not have to store nuclear waste onsite. They pay a fee for this. The time when it was to come due was upon us and there was no place that was approved yet. So DOE was looking for dry, above ground storage. Great big concrete lined shroud tanks called dry storage and places to put them and hold them on a temporary basis, maybe ten, twenty years, whatever would be needed until final storage would happen. So the locals got ahold of this and though DOE had just kind of announced this since we had a lot of very savvy, and not – scientists and citizens, it was decided to form a city/county blue ribbon taskforce and review this whole situation and try to negotiate details and money perhaps from the Department of Energy. This taskforce was set up and it worked for two years. It had three major committees. They were Transportation, which I think was Tom Row, Ecology and Safety, and Bob Peelle, who was by this time an elected county commissioner, and Larry – the fellow who died – were – they were the chairpeople of the major committees. They – and I was an unpaid consultant to the Economic and Social Impacts Committee since social impacts was a field I had initiated for the federal government for impact statements back in – when I was hired at the lab in 1975. The Impacts Committee said, “Well we think this is – a lot of things need to be done to – how would the city have any input? How would we have any control? How is this going to affect our future?” My comment – they said, “What should we do except oppose it?” I said, “Well if you have things that you think you want, why not ask for them and make that a condition of approval?” So that work went on apace in the group I was with but especially in my husband’s group, he had a number of people from Roane County including the mayor of Kingston who were not so sure about this, and he had the State of Tennessee road – TDOT person for the five county area here was on the committee. It was a wonderful committee: Roane State people and professors and Oak Ridge scientists who were knowledgeable. His approach was, “Well let’s formulate some questions.” What was happening was that Joe King, the assistant city manager had just had a whole series of public involvement sessions throughout the city of Oak Ridge seeking input for what was – what citizens wanted from the city and with and for the city. He was the person, the city person in charge. What happened then was these committees, the Social Impacts as well as the Environmental Committee and the Transportation Committee would funnel questions for DOE through Joe King and he would go to Peter Gross, the DOE person, and say, “Well how about doing this or that?” This was quite a shock to the DOE people, but what they said – but Peter was a reasonable guy and trying to perform his role as the contact person for DOE. What he turned – so Joe King would wait and take the next question and go with the same thing. “All right, well then if you don’t like that, well how about this, some money for tourism and whatever?” So it turned out to be a daily negotiation between Joe King, our very skilled guy. No wonder he became city manager at several of the other atomic communities and negotiating with Peter Gross. “Well, all right, let’s listen to your ideas then.” So DOE didn’t have any ideas except putting it there but he had the whole list, this blue ribbon taskforce funneling questions in, and every day Joe King would go to see him. It ended up that Bob’s committee was the seminal one. They went to other atomic facilities and looked at them all, to Hanford, to Argonne, to this, that and the other and New Mexico where WIPP was. On the isolation provided by those trips, Bob established good working relations with all the people and he said, “Well if you don’t – if you have questions, we will continue asking questions until there are no more questions. We’ll ask every one.” They ended up with sixty-four questions, and in fact Bob assisted some of them who, without technical backgrounds, they said, well, they didn’t really know what they wanted to ask, but they were worried about this area. So Bob would help them formulate language to ask the question. The net result of all this was – I as a – here I was seeing this wonderful test case evolve before my eyes. I was stunned by what the group was doing and how able they were. I happened to be in chemotherapy at the same time. So between trips to NIH and cancer treatments at Bethesda and so on, I would come back and the hearings would be going on and I would flop down in the backseat of our car and rest till I could get up and listen. At the end of it all, I decided it was such a fantastic opportunity, I should document what happened and I didn’t learn many of these things about what happened within the committees until I went and interviewed every one of them and learned about Bob’s role in convincing people that it might be safe. “It was nothing,” he said. He just said, “We will look and we will seek answers to every question,” and that worked so well, the net result was the committee put out a report and they said in very graded nuanced ways, “We think it could be safe, but we are not sure that it will be, considering how will we know about bureaucracies, and we want to have a say-so on conditions. We get to say yes or no on this, this, and this on the timeline.” There were twenty-three such conditions. They wrote their report and they said, “It’s conditional acceptance. We think it can be safe provided with these twenty-three conditions.��� By the time – but this was in the matter not just for the local place which had worked itself into this, and it had been studied up and down the yin yang and it was really very exciting – both governing bodies, the Roane County Commission and the City of Oak Ridge City Council approved the entire thing, the report of the committee and the twenty-three conditions. Then all hell broke loose up at the – in Nashville. Governor Lamar Alexander was opposed. So were our senators. They turned it down. They wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t go through the process that this committee had. They wouldn’t consider it seriously. “Well that’s just Oak Ridge.” It’s too bad. It was – because it was turned down, finally, by the votes of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act where the governors of states have these powers without including or really acknowledging this work. So I wrote a paper about this, as did others. Amy Fitzgerald wrote a paper in her poly science stuff. There were several other professionals who were not as much involved as I was but who wrote papers. My paper was the negotiations that took place negotiating for nuclear waste siting and the whole idea of voluntary siting. I had these voluntary siting ideas I was trying out which I later used on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Negotiator, David Leroy and ended up as part-time staff for him on another such voluntary siting thing out in Wyoming. So the paper I wrote was the seminal paper for voluntary siting and was used in – and was the basis for my work for the next fifteen years. But I thought what happened here was just extraordinary to show – because I’ve always been interested in the relationship in decision making and communication between technical people and citizens and the pitfalls and so on. Why nuclear siting – why the first nuclear era has ended poorly, nothing built for thirty years in part is because of the attitudes, I think, of technical people who said to the citizens who were concerned, “Well now if you’d just go and become a nuclear engineer or if you’ll just learn all this stuff like we know why then you’d be in favor,” but they don’t take the time to really listen to the non-technical people and figure out what their concerns are as this very unusual taskforce did.
Mr. McDaniel: Do you think now there’s a – we have a new president and there���s a – he seems to be promoting kind of a new era of nuclear power. Do you think the process that this committee went through is going to – the findings of it – to be beneficial to that new initiative?
Mrs. Peelle: They would be in my opinion but I don’t think there’s much chance. The problem – nuclear does have problems and hubris is one of them. I worked with Alvin Weinberg and Charles Forsberg at the lab in ’94 looking at the second nuclear era and it was my view then that they – unless the – I compared this with nuclear waste negotiations and negotiators in the other countries in the world that had them, Sweden, France. Let’s see, Bonneville Power is a good example of negotiations with the locals. If those techniques were used, and if the structure were such that local people – the problem is local people – for the siting – these big things – they bear the costs, but they may or may not get any of the benefits. I’ve often wondered if the TMI story would have been different if the utility there had been one of those that paid its way in local taxes, because not – depending on state law, some nuclear power plants do and others don’t. It makes a big difference.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. I’m sure. All right. Let’s kind of wrap things up a little bit with your interview. I think that’s important. You can talk a little bit about the – some of the social activities that you have as far as literacy and the Tabitha’s Table and the Martin Luther King Celebration Committee work if you can.
Mrs. Peelle: Okay. The –
Mr. McDaniel: Let me do something real quick before we start that. Just a moment.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: �� got there?
Mrs. Peelle: Well it’s interesting that this sort of reflection and probing is just happening now.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah. Exactly.
Mrs. Peelle: It’s too bad that so many of the principals are gone.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh absolutely. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about those final issues.
Mrs. Peelle: One of my main concerns as a citizen over the years has been literacy and the lack of it in Tennessee. I think it’s very serious for our state and for all of us who live here that we’re – what – fourth from the bottom or something in the number of people at age twenty-six who have a high school degree as well as other things. As a member of the Altrusa Organization which is professional women and who have identified literacy as a main concern, I have been involved as the literacy person or the literacy – on the literacy committee for almost the whole time I’ve been there, which is twenty-some years. One of the first things I did on the – on the literacy committee was to work with the American Vision person who was – this was a – I forget her name as well as the government program she worked with. She was a volunteer for two years in Clinton and Oak Ridge and she worked on literacy. So in discussions with her and with the committee I set up through Altrusa and Willow Brook School, we got onto the value of an adult tutoring program for children who are not learning to read. It turns out that if a child is not reading well by fourth grade they’re more or less lost to our system, because as it turns out, the first three years or four if you have kindergarten in school are devoted to learning to read. After that, at grade four, you have to be able to read in order to learn. There are – we have especially at schools with the underprivileged, as at Willow Brook, which has – sixty-seven percent of the children there are on free lunch – many who are struggling, and it just cut me to the quick to learn that if more of the people than educators recognized the key importance of fourth grade in your skills at that level – but it’s the prison planners. They look at what the numbers are of who is reading and who isn’t. For the fraction that isn’t, they say, “Well this helps us plan the prison population facilities we’ll need in ten years.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: That’s right. So I was searching for some other handle for getting on this, and whereas the City of Oak Ridge already had half a dozen literacy programs and special things, the idea of adult tutors was the one that this person Debbie came up with and was implementing in Oak Ridge and in Clinton, I think. The idea of an adult tutor is the value for a child who is having difficulty in having once a week, half an hour visit with their own adult tutor. These are just ordinary people, grandparents. They often end up serving as substitute grandparents, substitute parents wherein, “You read to me, I’ll read to you. What’s going on in your life now?” Getting books that – this to my utter astonishment works for eighty percent of the children. Whatever problems they are having, parents are divorcing, they’re abused, they don’t have enough money, whatever. Whatever those problems are or abusive children, eighty percent of them can get over whatever that hump is and start – they learn to read. I thought, “My gosh, this ought to be – we ought to have as many tutors as they need.” So we picked – worked out with the Willow Brook principal at that time who was Craig – I’ll have to fill in all the names later – trying adult tutors. I signed up the first twenty-five people myself and had to go through a two hour orientation, which was just learning how to cooperate with the teachers, because you want the teachers to be requesting this. They have to give time out of class for students. Teachers have become its biggest proponent of – and then they meet their kid and oftentimes very close personal bonds are formed. It’s like – it’s the cheerleading function that, “You’re good and you’re an important enough person that I come and spend a half an hour time just for you.” I was just astounded. So I tried to get this number up of tutors. So it was working at Willow Brook, and we wanted to get some city funding for this. This was all volunteer and you need people who keep the records and run the operations and talk with the teachers and it has to be coordinated, which hour and which students. Other schools wanted it too, and we talked the city school system into funding a half-time coordinator. Then we advanced the program year by year to Woodland and to Glenview and Cedar Hill and our other four schools and it’s still working well, but we don’t have enough volunteers and I haven’t – it was down to seventy-five when I last checked in on it. I asked the coordinator, “Well, how many do you need?” She said, ���Oh we need a hundred. We always need more than we have because we have children who don’t have anybody to be tutored by.” So that is the reason I then have organized and served as the Chairman of the big literacy fundraising that we have here every year where Altrusa and Breakfast Rotary combine and coordinate, and we have fifty volunteers and we invite an author from outside and we talk about literacy, and we have big events and we pay money and we raise – when I – I did it three times, not necessarily in a row, and got – moved it from just money for GED for elders. I said, “We’ve got to have support for children,” because it often takes ten years for a very motivated adult to learn. It’s just so much harder.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure.
Mrs. Peelle: If you – let’s work on this. Now we supply tutors for down to first grade. Teachers are already saying, “Well this one is going to need a tutor.” So that’s just one of the things that I have felt is very important. We now use the proceeds from the literacy luncheon which are up to fourteen, fifteen thousand dollars, and we’ve gotten it organized into a program where people, other groups that can do something special in literacy can have a grant. They can apply for grants up to the fifteen thousand dollars that we raise.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well, talk a little bit about Tabitha’s Table.
Mrs. Peelle: Tabitha’s Table is one of the other things I’ve learned about and that is through my church. As the Social Action Chair at my church I heard about this feature. The Robertsville Baptist Church, it’s a good ecumenical program here, has been serving the – feeding and serving the hungry every Monday night for fifteen years, and it was always – but they – we learned about it because one of our volunteers when she was in graduate school for nursing had learned about it, and she just went over there on a Monday night to cook and learned that the whole thing was really running out of gas because there weren’t enough volunteers. It was originally Robertsville’s hope that each of the churches here would take a night and feed the hungry every night of the week, and that hasn’t happened. So we – this person, Livvy Clemons came back to our committee and said, “We need to fund and put up a team of Unitarians to take one of those nights and give the Baptists some rest,” and they really are – the Baptists are to be commended. They provide their church and they run the pantry and get the – do the paperwork to get some of the foods we can get from Second Harvest. So this is – and we’ve been doing this now for many years. Other churches joined, but then they come and go. Sometimes they send a few people. The First Methodists had a team and the Freewill Baptists have had a team, but it generally comes down now to the Baptists and the Unitarians and I still hope that there might be others who come. It’s very educational for both sides of the table when we serve a meal. We cook, deliver to shut-ins, serve, clean up all in the space of four or five hours, and most – no one but the cooks has to spend more than an hour. We now have two teams at our church, the red team and the blue team, so that they don’t have to do it every month.The demand has gone up. So it’s more than – when I left – I did the organization on a month by month basis at our church for seven or eight years and finally you need – everybody has burnout. I had other things I wanted to do. So we organized into two teams and four organizers. It’s going great guns, but the numbers have increased from forty or fifty to sixty, seventy. These are the working poor and the disabled and there are no questions asked. There’s no means test. Anyone may come who wants a meal. So that’s been one of my other specialties.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, well then let’s kind of finish up and talk about – you’ve been active in the Martin Luther King celebration here in Oak Ridge for a number of years.
Mrs. Peelle: I had not – after this humongous effort that we all made back in the ’50s and ’60s of trying to desegregate, it was always our hope that integration would follow at some later time. Of course there’s a big difference between desegregation and integration. So time went on and I was busy with other things and with work and I had twelve years of serious illness, chronic fatigue syndrome for seven and cancer for five. When I recovered from all that, I didn’t have cancer, and I didn’t have chronic fatigue anymore, either. So I have a lot of catch-up to do. So I’ve been noticing through the years though that the thing is that we were resegregating on many fronts and not liking that and not knowing just what if anything to do in the current era. But I was involved in a church seminar on racism in 1994 run by a black layperson from our Charleston, South Carolina church. At the end of that, he said, “I would like everybody to make a commitment for one thing that you will do.” What came out of it for me, I said, “I would like to work toward making Martin Luther King an American hero – perceived as an American hero, not just a black hero because in my view he is – much of his work and his teaching and his action is universal.” So in nineteen – that was in ’94 – in ’95, I went and volunteered for the Martin Luther King City Committee and found out that Anthony Allen, the originator of that, was suffering burnout, and the next year I managed to get Donna Mosby involved, and she and I remained – for many years, I was the only white person on the committee – and we put on this amazing set of programs in that week before and after Martin Luther King’s birthday on January 15th. There are regularly fourteen programs, which we only put on two or three of them, and I put on the personal testimonies program that I showed you the copy of. We have an interfaith church service and there is every – on alternate years, the black artists show for – juried show – is put on by the Art Center and other churches and groups and the hospital, schools put on programs. We coordinate that. We try to get people to tell us what they’re doing and publish news articles about that and a big poster that gives the whole schedule. So we’ve been doing that steadily.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. I think if the other citizens of Oak Ridge had been as active and influential in their community as you have been with – this wouldn’t be the same place.
Mrs. Peelle: Well it’s – this is an effort to translate my personal values into action and to try to do so, to learn the most effective ways of doing that and that helps you in revising and committing yourself to ways that work.
Mr. McDaniel: Well thank you very much. This has been enormously interesting and I appreciate you sharing your life with us.
Mrs. Peelle: I look forward to listening to some of the other videos because all the things I was involved with I was not – I was rarely a solo. Many, many other people were involved, especially on the desegregation stuff.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, thank you very much.
Mrs. Peelle: It’s been a pleasure to live in Oak Ridge because it was that sort of a place. We are hoping with Oak Ridge’s changes that there’ll be more involvement than the – because it’s been kind of dropping away, I think, with the aging of the – my cohort.
[end of recording]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF ELIZABETH PEELLE
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
February 23, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: I am Keith McDaniel and today is February the 23rd, 2010. I am here with Elizabeth Peelle at the Midtown Community Center here in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Peelle, tell me a little bit about – how did you come to Oak Ridge? How did you end up in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Peelle: I came clutching my new bachelor’s degree in Chemistry to work as a chemist at the K-25 plant in 1954. In fact, it was the summer of 1954 and it was the monumental – not for that event, but before, because of the Brown versus Board of Education decision brought down by the Supreme Court, I believe in May of 1954, had a lot of bearing to do with some of our later activities here in the city.
Mr. McDaniel: Now where did you come from?
Mrs. Peelle: I was born in Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Went to school in Ohio, Western College for Women and graduated there in 1954.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came to Oak Ridge to work at K-25 in 1954?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How did that come about? How did that – how did you find out about the job?
Mrs. Peelle: Well in that period in the 1950s, we were all learning about nuclear energy and nuclear power, and as a high school science student, chemistry/physics major then, it was very exciting to be thinking about atoms and what they were doing and nuclear energy in general. There was a real romance about the whole nuclear business. This was to be the front edge, the leading edge of science. So going to Oak Ridge was already something I knew about in high school, and of the jobs that I had offered to me at the end of my graduation in ’54, one was to have gone with “Generous” Electric [laughter] or GM Foods in Ohio and the other was to come to Oak Ridge. So that wasn’t any contest for me.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you came to Oak Ridge, were you single?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. I lived in Batavia Hall right across the street from Jackson – in Jackson Square, 111 Batavia Hall. It’s now the big parking lot for our only skyscraper.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. What was it like being here in ’54 and being single and right out of college in an exciting new job?
Mrs. Peelle: Well I came without a car. So I had one of these many dorm rooms and found myself – I used the AIT public transit system out to K-25 and I walked the city for entertainment. I learned when – every night or evening after work, if I didn’t go swimming in the brand new pool, then I would walk the streets of Oak Ridge way over to the East End, and I knew every street there and many of the byways by the time the first year was over.
Mr. McDaniel: So you walked a lot then didn’t you?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: All over town. So you were – now what did you do at K-25?
Mrs. Peelle: I was a chemist and I did low temperature gas absorption work which was really working on the nickel barriers.
Mr. McDaniel: So that was in 1954. Then tell me a little bit about your life after you came here. I mean what happened over the next few years and –
Mrs. Peelle: Since I got tired of public transportation – in fact they were already closing down some of the public things – the city was managed by the Atomic Energy Commission through its local contractor, the MSI Services – I found a carpool and was driving out to work with them. I was – as a rider, though, since I still had no vehicle. There was a very active singles community. In fact, everyone was young. We – I found a church home very soon in the – with – our group was meeting in one of the few public spaces in the city, which was in the green room in Jackson Square immediately adjacent to the public library. I became active in that church, and after a year I decided – I’m kind of a slow learner, but I finally figured out that there was not going to be much advancement for women in the K-25 operation. I was getting ready to take off and go back to graduate school when a friend, a mutual friend said, “I’ve got this guy you need to meet soon,” but it never happened and I was getting ready to leave. So finally my friend hurried up, and it turns out that Bob was working at Neutron Physics Division at the lab and finishing his thesis. He was an ABD from Princeton and of course his being hired was contingent upon completing that. Anyway, we met in March of 1955 and in a couple of months decided to get married. We were married in September, 1955 back at the wonderful French modeled chapel on the campus, and we moved back here and set up shop in his Garden Apartment at that time. We lived there for the first ten years of our marriage.
Mr. McDaniel: So you met him in ’55 and got married and decided to stay here?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you both decided to stay here?
Mrs. Peelle: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So did you go – so were you still working at K-25 or did you –
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. I worked there for the first four years and then decided – by that time, we were being already involved in the newly formed first interracial group in the city, the Community Relations Council and we had monthly meetings in which the black residents would come. Most of them were janitors and maids because in fact there were only three job categories open for blacks in the city at that time. This was kind of old army camp. Brilliant leading edge science, but we were kind of backward in having been an army camp since the beginning of the war.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I was just double checking here just to make sure everything was going well. With the monitor on the other side sometimes I have to do that. So coming to Tennessee, let’s talk about that a little bit. Was that a culture shock for you?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Well tell me a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: But of course, this was not standard Tennessee. This was a boom town and an old army camp. In fact, the city had the Clinton Engineer Works which was the nom de plume by which this was known or – not to say – Oak Ridge was not set up until ’42, ’43. So in the city, we lived with people who had come from all over the country to work here and with many of the craftspeople and laborer people being local or at least Tennessee or from the South, but the scientific community was largely from out-of-state, so it was very cosmopolitan in the friendships we made. But then we discovered this strange – the old army camp thing – as how they affected the other half of the population, which was black. Most blacks had been brought in on labor trains from the Deep South. Many of them were near illiterate. These were from Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama. So when we discovered the labeled white and colored water fountains out at work and separate time clocks for union people, black or white – so of course separate bathrooms, certainly. The main problem we saw in the city was that though the schools had been integrated in the fall of 1955, a year after Brown versus – by the order of the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], that extended only to the high school and that – we heard accounts of the concerns of our friends as well as others. There was a lot of tension on the opening day at Oak Ridge High, but with adults standing around, some of them very unhappy and a few making threatening noises, but they knew better than to get too far out of line or their jobs, they figured, might be at stake. But out of that group, we began organizing monthly meetings to educate ourselves, and we knew that the local public services, the public ones like the library, of course, were open, but very little else was. There were no – blacks could eat at lunch counters sometimes, especially if they went to the backdoor as they did at the White – I can’t think of the name. It’s escaped me – the “White House”? The “White Angel”? Down on the turnpike. I’ll correct that when the name comes back to me.
Mr. McDaniel: The Snow White –
Mrs. Peelle: Snow White.
Mr. McDaniel: The Snow White Restaurant?
Mrs. Peelle: Snow White Restaurant and even the Oak Terrace Dining Hall run by Roscoe Stevens out at Grove Center would not serve blacks.
Mr. McDaniel: Really? What about the – now by this time were the cafeterias still going, the army cafeterias or had they already been shut down?
Mrs. Peelle: Well we had –
Mr. McDaniel: Or turned over to private?
Mrs. Peelle: The Oak Ridge Mall developed downtown in 1955 as a strip mall and Davis Cafeteria and McCrory’s, Walgreens were all there and served food. It’s just that they wouldn’t serve blacks.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about your work and what you did to desegregate the town and to – and the businesses?
Mrs. Peelle: Well they’re really separate. I operated a mercury manometer, the air columns, and a lot of L28 with the liquid nitrogen, that surrounded these tubes, premade tubes that we dealt with that had what was nickel barrier in them, though I think it was – we knew but were not supposed to publicize what this was we were working on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But it was the barrier material for K-25?
Mrs. Peelle: We would measure the absorption of L28 on the – within these tubes. Of course the tubes looked mostly all the same but there were different types of barriers in them and different amounts of chemicals in them. So we made measurements and when we had a mercury spill, which is quite possible with dealing with mercury manometers we – even at that era, ’54 to ’58 when I worked there, we would all have to evacuate the room until it was cleaned up. There were apparently not nearly so many precautions taken using mercury which was going on simultaneously at Y-12, and ended up, as you have probably heard, with I don’t know how many hundreds of tons of mercury in White Oak Creek that came into town and flowed through it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. So let’s go back to your work in the desegregating, the group that you were working with. Talk a little bit about some of the things that you folks initiated and worked through.
Mrs. Peelle: We decided being very – we were so naïve. We decided we’d better educate ourselves, and of course the basic premise was that of academic people. Surely if people knew what was going on, they would be agreeable to changing it because it was not fair to have half of the population be unable to go to the bowling alleys or to the movies or to the sit-ins, to the lunch counters, or even many stores would really not allow blacks in them. Of course they had to – blacks had to go out of town to get a haircut. The main thing we learned, though, was the Scarboro School and how – the extraordinary history of education for blacks in Oak Ridge. During the war, black workers were told not to bring their children, to leave them at home because the army didn’t want to fiddle with having desegregation – segregated – dealing with black education at all. The housing for blacks was very strange and substandard. There were buildings known as hutments, which were really just four walls, no – a door and no windows but you could lift up one side to get some ventilation – no screens either – and a coal stove in the middle. At one point, the AEC through MSI was renting four corners of a hutment to four different people if you were black.
Mr. McDaniel: I believe those were 16x16.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes and four people lived in them.
Mrs. Peelle: Four people. Each one had a corner. Blacks we knew – since there were two or three professional blacks and that was all, they took to renting rooms in Knoxville to keep their things, because there was no privacy. There were no lockers. There was nothing. Of course, some people brought their children anyway. It’s just that they learned to hide under the hutments or under the flattop housing which existed in the Woodland area and in much of what is now I think the city park around the Civic Center.
Mr. McDaniel: Also many of the men, married men were separated from their wives.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. There were some.
Mr. McDaniel: So let’s talk a little bit about the transition of desegregation in the city and what you and your group’s involvement was there.
Mrs. Peelle: We negotiated, attempted to educate. We invited the personnel and in fact the top managers of some of the plants to come in and talk with us about employment opportunities and employment arrangements. How come there were these separate fountains and separate restrooms and separate time clocks and why weren’t there any professional blacks? Logan Emlett came, I remember, to one of our meetings. We negotiated with Roscoe Stevens of the Oak Terrace, telling him that we would be glad to support and give – we would be glad to organize to show positive support by many white people because all the business people had the same complaint. They said, “If we serve blacks, we’ll lose business. Nobody else will come.” Many of our efforts were devoted to right there, at that nexus. The techniques we used were generally to show public support, white support for opening the facilities. We would issue tickets to people. We had programs trying within one exploratory barbershop that we would arrange – we would urge white people to attend the barbershop for a month’s trial especially from – and with a little card that said, “I would – thank you. I would support opening this facility to everyone.” Then doing trials, etc. None of that worked.
Mr. McDaniel: None of that worked. This was probably what? The late ’50s?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes, and barbershops were the last holdouts. So in the history papers, memo that I published here, it’s a history of segregation, 1943 to 1960, which in fact was one of our organizing tools while we were watching sit-ins and other efforts by blacks to be admitted to services elsewhere in the South. That was one of our final efforts to be – have some documentation to show City Council, to show business people, to show the public that – what the history had been. I do want to speak about one of the most extraordinary things on education that we applied for blacks that we found when we got here, and that was we had an operating volunteer high school for Scarboro people that was accredited by the state. I was never a part of this. I just learned about it after I came, which blew me away. We had – in that high school, subjects taught included physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, English, history, etc., and we – that group which I learned about really only afterwards – there are half a dozen people and some of them still living who were volunteer teachers for that effort. Finally, the school system hired two additional staff persons to legitimate. This was a volunteer, accredited high school because there was no school for blacks except to ride a bus into Knoxville to go to East High there. Most of them didn’t [return to school] once they left Scarboro School. There are also many other interesting stories about Mrs. Officer. Arizona Officer was her name, the teacher, principal, educator who was brought in by the AEC immediately post-war because the army decided, “Well now I suppose we have to settle down and offer some schooling for blacks,” which we had not done. Her husband, Robert Officer, was the sixth grade teacher. I got to know her quite well and found she was an extraordinary person among the stories we got from her and from other residents of Scarboro. By this time there was – Scarboro had been developed separately on new land on the south side of Illinois Avenue, and there was a community, an isolated community built there with real housing even though many of them had only one door or a few other things that wouldn’t have been tolerated elsewhere. To recruit children for the school, Mrs. Officer found that she had to – since children who had lived there during the war were, of course, not able to go to school and they and their parents adopted various schemes that the children would go hide when any white people appeared, so Mrs. Officer found herself down on her hands and knees sometimes crawling under trailers to coax the children to come out so they could be registered to go to school.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Let’s pause for just a second. I’m going to check this.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Peelle: I would like to talk about the Scarboro dump also.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let’s talk about that next. Tell me about the Scarboro dump.
Mrs. Peelle: As we were having these meetings on a regular basis with the Community Relations Council we heard – made friends with, of course, and began to hear stories from the blacks who came to the meetings about what their life was like and one of the big complaints was that the dump, the city dump was in Scarboro and that it burned irregularly. This was causing fumes and it was really not a very nice place. It wouldn’t have been tolerated probably in any of the white areas. So the – I was the Social Action Chair at that point in my church, the Unitarian Church, and we had black members who helped provide us with more information and we decided to go as a church group to what functioned as the city organization still run by AEC and ask about this and request some changes. So we did, including – we took along – one of our members was Bill Scott who was the Recreation Director for the city of Oak Ridge. We didn’t have a city yet, but we called ourselves a city. We didn’t become incorporated until 1959. We went on the dump issue to the MSI offices and talked to Fred – Ed Puscas who was the Director of the Public Health Section. After we got to be a city, the powers that be decided we didn’t need public health anymore; it would be provided by the County. But we had a public health officer of our own, and we explained the problem as seen by the residents of Scarboro. Bill Scott provided a lot of additional details. Puscas, unlike most of our other efforts, Puscas said, “Well that sounds like a serious problem. I’m going to look into this and see if we can’t move the dump and upgrade it.” At the time he said, “Well there’s not supposed to be any fires there.” But the residents would say, “How often have you been out to Scarboro to look and smell?” So the – in due time, I think in less than a year that was all accomplished. Not only did the dump close in Scarboro but a modern landfill was opened on land outside of the city in Anderson County and upgraded to a landfill. So that was one of our first successes.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Let’s move on to the ’60s and the early ’60s. Talk a little bit about the junior high desegregation. As you said, the high school was desegregated in ’55 in Oak Ridge but there were probably lots of other events leading up to the mid ’60s.
Mrs. Peelle: The desegregation was ordered for the high school but not for the rest of the system. In fact, I opted out of most of the ’60s because I was finishing my dissertation, this little fourteen page history set my thesis back by about – I hate to tell you, but it was four or five months doing the research for it and interviewing the seventy-five people who contributed to it. So by the time I finished my thesis, I had two small children. In fact, I never went to my own graduation because Annette was born three days before. So what I heard about this, however, was quite spectacular and there were four or more mothers of black middle school junior high mothers who got involved and said they didn’t like the plan that was finally put forth by the city to just desegregate one of the junior highs and one of the elementary schools, sending all of the students from Scarboro school which was then closed – and there’s several sad stories about that – sending all of them to a very few schools. They wanted it distributed throughout. There was much discussion and there were many other actors. In fact we saw our first outside groups, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and others appeared. That’s how the CRC [Community Relations Council] got to become respectable. We were a very – in the years we operated, which was ’56 to ’62, such as the newspaper, the citizens really looked on this, well, our meetings as being very controversial.
Mr. McDaniel: Kind of a radical, fringe group.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes and there were kind of nasty things written about some of the individuals. “These women don’t shave their legs. I mean, this is really bad,” said Gene O’Bleness of the WATO Station. So we were – they were sure that – some people were sure this was a communist enclave naturally. However, when the ’60s really got going and we had our own demonstrations led by blacks and organized by blacks in our Downtown area – Davis Brothers Cafeteria, and McCrory’s, and Walgreens – and when SNCC organized it – that was the Southern Christian Leadership Council, I guess, and many of the other black organized groups, and a few of them showed up, why suddenly we became very respectable.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Of course.
Mrs. Peelle: It was not an overnight transition, but in this process I remember the four mothers who specifically did most of the heavy work. They moved most of the dirt, and eventually they – it came out that there was a bussing system developed to distribute black students to all the elementary schools and both of the junior highs because Robertsville was going to be the only one. This took some intervention by some of the mothers when things were moving very slowly. At one point they appealed to the Federal Department of Housing and we had such people come to town, which was really quite a radical idea that another federal agency would show up here, even though by that time we were a new city. So the people whose names I remember – I knew all of them but I can only remember three names lately were Jackie Holloway, who is still here in the city, Kathleen Stevens, who has died since, Cele Meyer, who is a white woman and had teenagers – and there was at least a fourth one but the name escapes me. I can perhaps fill it in later.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: Eventually they won and that desegregation occurred. I can’t tell you exactly when since I was busy, very busy at that point raising small children.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s talk a little bit about the – you have a very interesting story about the barbershops and kind of last holdout of the whole getting a segregated barber here. So tell me a little bit about that story.
Mrs. Peelle: So this had a lot to do – I initiated some of this but most was carried out by men, of course. After I had recovered somewhat and my children were a little older, I came up for air about 1968 [coughs] looked around and said, “Where are we on the desegregation? Is everything done? The movies and the Laundromats?” Much of that was done. We had done picketing at the Laundromat in Jefferson Circle. We had marched when the Klan announced they were going to be here. We checked everything with the police and decided – in that case our first daughter was three months old. That took some real soul searching to decide to carry her on my back as I went on the one side of the street. The police arranged to separate the two groups. The Klan marched on one side of the street and we marched on the other and we had great confidence and had conferred all the time whenever we did anything that might have caused upset. So those things were behind us. There are many wonderful stories that others would need to tell you about how they integrated the Skyway, the outdoor drive-in movie, the bowling alleys and other things and even the Laundromats. All these things had happened in the ’60s except the barbershops. So when I came up for air and looked around that’s what was left. So I said, “Well,” and talked to the male members of our groups and blacks and whites whom I knew by this time, said, “We ought to have a barbershop committee.” We called the first meeting, and the chair people were in turn Bill Johnson, Bill – I’m blocking on it – and my husband. There were three people who became chair of that. It took several tries, because in talking with the barbershops, these men were all area people. They were practically all Southern. They told us they didn’t know how to cut that kind of hair. Some of them – those were the civil talks when we – people would go in to discuss it, there was a lot of other language sometimes used. So a program of testing sending in one white and one black together began at all the shops along with discussion. I know my Bob’s – my husband’s testing partner was – sorry about the senior moments.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s okay.
Mrs. Peelle: Willie someone. He was a custodian at the – for the city and a person who always was elegantly groomed and dressed. So he and my [husband] – and Bob would go in sometimes together, sometimes Bob first and the other. Meanwhile we’d be having a goodwill policy saying that, “We will support you if you open.” That wasn’t good enough. So for one of them, we said, “We’ll have – will you consider opening if we show you that there is a clientele that will support you?” This guy said yes. So we had a – we gave tickets. We organized teams and sent him maybe fifty extra customers in that one month period. Then the time of testing came and he refused service. So we had – there were a number of such episodes, some of which are detailed in the green sheets that I have appended to my history. Finally, we decided nothing was working and we decided we’d have to set up our own barbershop, which we did. One of the members of our committee had a brother-in-law who had just finished barber school up in Kentucky and we went into discussions whether he would move to Oak Ridge and what sort of support we should give to help with the transition. We sold tickets. They were good for a year and people would go – we sold them in advance so that we had the money and we could turn over the money and people would go and patronize. That barbershop is still working today. It’s Ken’s Barbershop in Jackson Square.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? That’s what I was about to ask where that is. So that was the �� that was set up specifically for both black and white men to have their hair cut?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes. Men or women it turns out that –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Peelle: It just galled me that residents of the city would have to go elsewhere, go out of town, Knoxville, Oliver Springs, wherever, to get a haircut. It seemed that we weren’t a complete city until we really could say and show that we did offer equal services to anybody who was –
Mr. McDaniel: When was – was that established in ’68 or –
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So it opened in ’68?
Mrs. Peelle: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did the other barbers follow through?
Mrs. Peelle: Oh no.
Mr. McDaniel: No?
Mrs. Peelle: I think some with time [coughs] – excuse me – with time and things that were changing elsewhere there of course were many foreign visitors to Oak Ridge. I think some of them went to other barbershops because this campaign even today is not known by most of the city of Oak Ridge what the history of Ken’s Barbershop is. Many of those who helped set it up are no longer with us. So foreign visitors to the lab who maybe lived here for a summer or a couple years, I’m sure they tried out these places but I don’t have a clear memory. I suspect some of them probably got service but I don’t really know.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well that’s an amazing story. Let’s move on to the – you have here “becoming a real city, the incorporation and cemesto sales.” If you want to talk about that a little bit we can. We’ve got a lot of that covered with some other folks but if you were – if there was some involvement that you had that you’d like to talk about, feel free.
Mrs. Peelle: Our involvement was just as citizens. We’re not part of any organization dealing with this. We were in favor of having a city even though there were many people who thought, “No, no. It was a bad idea. Oak Ridge would never thrive.” But the gates had already been taken down in ’49, but it was still – it wasn’t until ’59 that we got to be a city. “Oh the problem of housing. What will we do with that?” Since people rented – no one owned their homes at that point. People rented cemestos and the new housing in East and West Village, Title 7 or whatever it was, but we were not – we were only citizens acting. We were not part of any organization at that time.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, you did help and establish the Oak Ridge campus of Roane State and implementing the Oak Ridge Vision for Higher Education.
Mrs. Peelle: Yes, that was –
Mr. McDaniel: Talk a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: That’s the development and the formation of ORCHE, Oak Ridge Citizens for Higher Ed, education. It had been a long time dream of many people in the city that we – Oak Ridge ought to have a college. In fact we had raised money, I think as much as – I don’t know how many thousands of dollars. It was quite a few for that era and hired an organizer and trying to gin up the College of Oak Ridge, but unfortunately all these efforts fizzled out or failed.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let me adjust something real quick and then we’ll continue. Sure. I remember hearing something about the College of Oak Ridge. I certainly do. But it just never really got off the ground.
Mrs. Peelle: It never got off the ground, even though there was an office here for a year or more for the College of Oak Ridge, but it didn’t come together.
Mr. McDaniel: About what year was that? Do you remember?
Mrs. Peelle: I was trying to think for sure. I’m not sure. I think it was the late ’90s, mid or late ’90s but we can find out about that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: But meanwhile the community college had been organized and built in Roane County, one of our adjacent counties. As I’m sure you know, Oak Ridge – one precinct of Oak Ridge is part of Roane County, but the College, the original Roane State College exists in Harriman and is supported very broadly by the Roane County establishment.
Mr. McDaniel: That was opened in the early ’70s?
Mrs. Peelle: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mrs. Peelle: So in the meanwhile there was an outpost from Roane State started here in Oak Ridge. In fact it was extremely popular.
Mr. McDaniel: At the old Fairview School wasn’t it? Fairmont – what was the –
Mrs. Peelle: The old Paragon. Well that’s getting ahead of the story though. The – I don’t know the exact history, though it is – it can be found. There was a great pent up demand for community college courses here onsite. So pretty soon there were a large number of – there was no place, however, to hold them. So classes were held in churches, in communities, community centers, here in the Wildcat Den, all over town. At one point we counted there were thirteen locations, including broom closets.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mrs. Peelle: But there was a hard row to go here. First of all, there was never enough money. Roane State, Oak Ridge was seriously constrained even though they had students and enrollments coming out the ears. They were not funded enough to do much of this because in part there was great concern over in the rest of Roane County that Oak Ridge was going to take over Roane State, and they weren’t about to have this. They were very proud of Roane State. So this kind of – the climate of wonderful acceptance and many, many students, too many students and where to put them was growing on us here. Over some years and there was a local dentist who was on the higher Tennessee – Tennessee Higher Education Commission who was never very – somehow never very enthusiastic about the idea of an Oak Ridge version or venture into Roane State. So there were hard times here. In the process – this went on for some period. I can’t tell you just how long but I’m sure all of the rest of that is in the Roane State archives. At some point, the establishment in Oak Ridge – monies came due for buildings from the Higher Education – TDIC. Tennessee has this strange system of two commissions, one of which manages UT and the others manage the community colleges. There had just been moves, I believe, to integrate that a little more closely, but at this time that’s what we were faced with. A package of money came through to Roane County for Roane State, Oak Ridge, but people had different views of what should happen for that. Meanwhile, our committee – and I’ll tell you about its formation in a minute – had been going to Roane State talking with the presidents, Cuyler Dunbar and –
Mr. McDaniel: Sherry Hoppe?
Mrs. Peelle: Sherry Hoppe –
Mr. McDaniel: Sherry Hoppe.
Mrs. Peelle: – and we were meeting with them frequently. We would document the number of students there were who couldn’t – who would try to enroll but couldn’t, were turned away because there wasn’t enough space. We took questionnaires as to how many students would like – what were they looking for here in Oak Ridge. We published the numbers as to how many students served and underserved there were. When this bucket of – what turned the tide was this bucket of money they intended for Roane State Oak Ridge for a permanent building. The powers that be decided there was really no need for a Roane State venture in Oak Ridge and, gee, we could have – by giving our money, giving Roane State’s money, Roane County’s money to Knoxville, and we could have a really good Pellissippi campus and that was only six miles away. That was how things were going when some of us decided, “Hey wait a minute.” [laughs] So we formed ORCHE, Oak Ridge Citizens for Higher Ed because we felt this was an outrage, really. We felt the need had been demonstrated and the money was for a Roane State operation. It was not for Knoxville. But this was the era of – the beginning era of, “Let’s have cooperation between Oak Ridge and reduce its isolation and let’s” – we’d be co-partnering with Knoxville and the surrounding areas better than we have. Somehow they always left Roane County out of that. But that’s another story. So they were getting ready. This included a local banker in the Chamber of Commerce, at least one local banker and others who were – had already voted to give Roane State’s money to Knoxville. So ORCHE was formed on the – and there – our one real feature that kept us going for years was Wayne Clark’s offer of land in Oak Ridge for Roane State. This was by the powers that be kind of (a) derided and (b) not listened to. This had been – Wayne had made these offers, apparently, a number of times. I was a member of the committee of fifty at that point set up by Representative Marilyn Lloyd in the ’80s to think about the future of Oak Ridge and so on. For some reason, we were having outreach and there was a meeting called at the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which no longer exists, some building over in the east end of Oak Ridge, on what people would like to see for Oak Ridge. Wayne Clark got up in that meeting – many other ideas were being talked about and said, well, it was a matter of great distress to him personally that City Council and the powers that be in the city were not receptive to his offers of land for a Roane site, for a Roane State College of Oak Ridge and citing – we all knew about the unmet dream of having a College of Oak Ridge. So he made this statement at the meeting that I was chairing. I called a meeting of people who were interested in higher ed in Oak Ridge and particularly in Wayne’s offer, and seeing what we could do to reverse or, shall we say, get some citizen input to this decision that had been made and was being implemented by bankers and the Chamber of Commerce, giving away our bucket of money. So this is – we hung on for years doing – gathering more information and having these surveys of students and meeting with students, meeting with faculty, meeting with Sherry Hoppe and Pat Rush joined our group. She was a councilwoman, elected councilwoman at that point. We were trying to figure out what we could do to move – see that those monies didn’t get spent, didn’t get given to Knoxville but were spent here in Oak Ridge and how could we do it. Finally, we made enough noise and the enrollments continued to boom every time that the state would give just a little more. “Well you could have another fifteen students in the nursing program,” whatever, why enrollments would boom and there was always this waiting list. Finally, the Paragon Health Club there on the east turnpike was up for sale and we hatched the idea of maybe the city would like to rent that for a year, just make a trial of this. There was a lot of politicking went on which I wasn’t necessarily involved in, but our committee in the – you should interview the few remaining members including Burt Chappell who was our chairperson of that committee. Pat Rush is apparently very elderly and I’m not sure she can –
Mr. McDaniel: Pat is on –
Mrs. Peelle: Is she?
Mr. McDaniel: She’s an immediate scheduled. We’re trying to schedule her now.
Mrs. Peelle: Ask her about Roane. Ask her about ORCHE and how we got Roane State. Eventually the – things were coming to a head also with the mall in difficulty and the owner of the strip mall – there was a group coming in from Pennsylvania who wanted to take over the mall, force out the existing thing, and they had bought some land right in – near Jefferson Junior High. That land came into question for, you know, would that be a suitable site. But we did finally get the City Council to begin renting the Paragon building. Of course, when Roane State was given that offer, they immediately filled it up and needed more, but they had a place then where they could meet other than in broom closets and in thirteen other locations. From that point on, the idea began to gather steam. There were still a lot of rough spots which I’m not going to go into here, but we enlarged our committee and eventually it became the thing to do when the Coffeys and McNallys decided that it should go. Coffey’s generous gift of some millions of dollars cemented it in place. By then we were respectable. It was okay. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Once again, you’re group was respectable.
Mrs. Peelle: Well this is a completely different group.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly.
Mrs. Peelle: Finally, the power structure took it over and it went. We raised several million dollars here to match the Coffey funds and Roane State has prospered and has become really a vital part, I think, of the city. In fact, I don’t understand why the City Council delays funding of the next building program at Roane State. They can spend all this money on IDB junkets and the one institution in the city that is positive and provides opportunities and from which with Sherry Hoppe’s leadership we now have five satellite places as well and distance learning – there have been a lot of innovations been done and we hope that they’ll be welcomed and recognized more fully, for that I think is the wonderful work that has been going on there at Roane State, Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Very good. All right. Let me change tapes and we will move on.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s talk just a little bit about the creating the first west end greenbelt. Tell me a little bit about that.
Mrs. Peelle: Well there’s – by now life had gone on. We were well established and happy Oak Ridgers, but we had occasion to – since we like the outdoors and since we have a national historic walking trail along the crest of Oak Ridge – to rue the fact that there were no city greenbelts beyond Illinois Avenue. None in the entire West End. Unlike the war time era, when, you may be aware that the greenbelts that occurred were in part a necessity because all the heavy dirt moving equipment for making houses was at play and in use at the plants. So Skidmore, Merrill & Owens laid out a city plan that created forested and “unused areas” between the major road system of Oak Ridge which has led to many beautiful walkways, as I learned in my first year here in Oak Ridge when I walked every street repeatedly. So down the West End – and by now, Bob and I lived in Roane County, Oak Ridge out on Oklahoma Avenue. Suddenly there wasn’t – and we were enjoying the de facto woods and being right next to the AEC fence and areas that were not used.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sorry. Could you – do you need that paper that you have in your hand?
Mrs. Peelle: No, I don’t.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. The microphone’s picking up the rattling a little bit.
Mrs. Peelle: Sorry.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right. So you were living on Oklahoma.
Mrs. Peelle: So we’re living on Oklahoma, and suddenly the developers had a plan for developing an erstwhile green – what was our de facto greenbelt between Oklahoma and Nebraska. It’s specifically between Oklahoma and Newell Lane, for instance. The plan there was to put in seventy-two houses in that enclave with grades for the school bus and other vehicles of up to fifteen percent beyond that, which was allowed in the city development plan. There was an immediately formed opposition group. I know about opposition groups. It’s in my work as an environmental sociologist working on – I’ve worked with and studied professionally nimbi groups and been involved in siting nuclear power plants, coal plants, nuclear waste facilities, hazardous waste and so on. There are many citizen efforts to revise it, mainly to be involved in the decision making. But suddenly in Oak Ridge here there was a big effort formed to stop that development. We succeeded, and of course then I had buyer’s remorse as a professional, and I said, “Well, we ought to make something good come out of this.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Peelle: We talked Ridge Realty, which was the development company, into maybe dividing up those – that seventy-plus acres into large baby farm areas but without cutting down the trees, farms without trees. They did and began selling them. At this point, we studied those maps since we are adjacent to that area. Someone hatched the idea that, “Wouldn’t part of that make a nice greenbelt?” But then the problem was, “How in the world do we get a greenbelt now?” There hadn’t been any formed deliberately in Oak Ridge. What we had as greenbelts was an artifact of how the city was built and the fact that big bulldozers weren’t available to level every lot and cut down every tree before you started. So we hatched an idea, and Grant Stradley, our neighbor on Oklahoma and I conferred with many others and decided we would try to organize collecting money from the people, especially those adjacent to the seventeen acre park that we picked out which went right through the throat of the valley, Oklahoma avenue over to Newell. It was the largest plot. Most of the plots were seven, ten acres and there are eight of them in that area. This big one hadn’t sold yet. It cost forty-two thousand dollars, according to Ridge Realty. So what we did was assess all the home owners whose property immediately adjoined that as well as everybody else in the neighborhood. We asked for five hundred dollars from each of the home owners whose immediate property values would be enhanced by having a permanent greenbelt. Though our – Stradley’s parcel was within that area, I think, but ours – the Peelle’s at the top of the hill at 13 Oklahoma was not, and we even solicited all the other people in the immediate area. We, I think, kicked in five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, though we were not directly in this, and many of the people who lived on the old Oak Hills area, which is Oklahoma, Mason Lane, Westover, and Wildwood, many of those kicked in large amounts of money. We finally raised twenty-two thousand dollars back in the early ’80s – this is 1982 – and decided that was about as much as we could get, but that was roughly half the price that Ridge Realty Company had set for that parcel. So we went to City Council with our money and we said, “Will you match this so we can – and declare this as greenbelt?” That’s how we – they did and that’s how we got the first greenbelt in – by public/private funding –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: – in the entire western part of Oak Ridge. Unfortunately, we don’t have a policy of requiring developers to set aside land. Usually that – even out in the county they frequently ask a developer to set aside a place for a school. So that hasn’t happened in the West End, and certainly not for parks. So I was always very proud of that one event, giving back to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s move on to the MRS and the Joint City/Roane County Task Force. Talk a little bit about that and your involvement with that.
Mrs. Peelle: I feel that the MRS Task Force and how it operated –
Mr. McDaniel: MRS stood for –
Mrs. Peelle: Stood for Monitored Retrievable Storage. The proposal was from the Department of Energy to – when they were running into heavy water around the – no pun intended – around the country in plans and places and how to store high level nuclear waste, what could we do with it? The Yucca Mountain site and WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] were being delayed. This was in the ’80s, the time period that the agreements that had been made with the utilities and the government long ago that they would not have to store nuclear waste onsite. They pay a fee for this. The time when it was to come due was upon us and there was no place that was approved yet. So DOE was looking for dry, above ground storage. Great big concrete lined shroud tanks called dry storage and places to put them and hold them on a temporary basis, maybe ten, twenty years, whatever would be needed until final storage would happen. So the locals got ahold of this and though DOE had just kind of announced this since we had a lot of very savvy, and not – scientists and citizens, it was decided to form a city/county blue ribbon taskforce and review this whole situation and try to negotiate details and money perhaps from the Department of Energy. This taskforce was set up and it worked for two years. It had three major committees. They were Transportation, which I think was Tom Row, Ecology and Safety, and Bob Peelle, who was by this time an elected county commissioner, and Larry – the fellow who died – were – they were the chairpeople of the major committees. They – and I was an unpaid consultant to the Economic and Social Impacts Committee since social impacts was a field I had initiated for the federal government for impact statements back in – when I was hired at the lab in 1975. The Impacts Committee said, “Well we think this is – a lot of things need to be done to – how would the city have any input? How would we have any control? How is this going to affect our future?” My comment – they said, “What should we do except oppose it?” I said, “Well if you have things that you think you want, why not ask for them and make that a condition of approval?” So that work went on apace in the group I was with but especially in my husband’s group, he had a number of people from Roane County including the mayor of Kingston who were not so sure about this, and he had the State of Tennessee road – TDOT person for the five county area here was on the committee. It was a wonderful committee: Roane State people and professors and Oak Ridge scientists who were knowledgeable. His approach was, “Well let’s formulate some questions.” What was happening was that Joe King, the assistant city manager had just had a whole series of public involvement sessions throughout the city of Oak Ridge seeking input for what was – what citizens wanted from the city and with and for the city. He was the person, the city person in charge. What happened then was these committees, the Social Impacts as well as the Environmental Committee and the Transportation Committee would funnel questions for DOE through Joe King and he would go to Peter Gross, the DOE person, and say, “Well how about doing this or that?” This was quite a shock to the DOE people, but what they said – but Peter was a reasonable guy and trying to perform his role as the contact person for DOE. What he turned – so Joe King would wait and take the next question and go with the same thing. “All right, well then if you don’t like that, well how about this, some money for tourism and whatever?” So it turned out to be a daily negotiation between Joe King, our very skilled guy. No wonder he became city manager at several of the other atomic communities and negotiating with Peter Gross. “Well, all right, let’s listen to your ideas then.” So DOE didn’t have any ideas except putting it there but he had the whole list, this blue ribbon taskforce funneling questions in, and every day Joe King would go to see him. It ended up that Bob’s committee was the seminal one. They went to other atomic facilities and looked at them all, to Hanford, to Argonne, to this, that and the other and New Mexico where WIPP was. On the isolation provided by those trips, Bob established good working relations with all the people and he said, “Well if you don’t – if you have questions, we will continue asking questions until there are no more questions. We’ll ask every one.” They ended up with sixty-four questions, and in fact Bob assisted some of them who, without technical backgrounds, they said, well, they didn’t really know what they wanted to ask, but they were worried about this area. So Bob would help them formulate language to ask the question. The net result of all this was – I as a – here I was seeing this wonderful test case evolve before my eyes. I was stunned by what the group was doing and how able they were. I happened to be in chemotherapy at the same time. So between trips to NIH and cancer treatments at Bethesda and so on, I would come back and the hearings would be going on and I would flop down in the backseat of our car and rest till I could get up and listen. At the end of it all, I decided it was such a fantastic opportunity, I should document what happened and I didn’t learn many of these things about what happened within the committees until I went and interviewed every one of them and learned about Bob’s role in convincing people that it might be safe. “It was nothing,” he said. He just said, “We will look and we will seek answers to every question,” and that worked so well, the net result was the committee put out a report and they said in very graded nuanced ways, “We think it could be safe, but we are not sure that it will be, considering how will we know about bureaucracies, and we want to have a say-so on conditions. We get to say yes or no on this, this, and this on the timeline.” There were twenty-three such conditions. They wrote their report and they said, “It’s conditional acceptance. We think it can be safe provided with these twenty-three conditions.��� By the time – but this was in the matter not just for the local place which had worked itself into this, and it had been studied up and down the yin yang and it was really very exciting – both governing bodies, the Roane County Commission and the City of Oak Ridge City Council approved the entire thing, the report of the committee and the twenty-three conditions. Then all hell broke loose up at the – in Nashville. Governor Lamar Alexander was opposed. So were our senators. They turned it down. They wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t go through the process that this committee had. They wouldn’t consider it seriously. “Well that’s just Oak Ridge.” It’s too bad. It was – because it was turned down, finally, by the votes of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act where the governors of states have these powers without including or really acknowledging this work. So I wrote a paper about this, as did others. Amy Fitzgerald wrote a paper in her poly science stuff. There were several other professionals who were not as much involved as I was but who wrote papers. My paper was the negotiations that took place negotiating for nuclear waste siting and the whole idea of voluntary siting. I had these voluntary siting ideas I was trying out which I later used on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Negotiator, David Leroy and ended up as part-time staff for him on another such voluntary siting thing out in Wyoming. So the paper I wrote was the seminal paper for voluntary siting and was used in – and was the basis for my work for the next fifteen years. But I thought what happened here was just extraordinary to show – because I’ve always been interested in the relationship in decision making and communication between technical people and citizens and the pitfalls and so on. Why nuclear siting – why the first nuclear era has ended poorly, nothing built for thirty years in part is because of the attitudes, I think, of technical people who said to the citizens who were concerned, “Well now if you’d just go and become a nuclear engineer or if you’ll just learn all this stuff like we know why then you’d be in favor,” but they don’t take the time to really listen to the non-technical people and figure out what their concerns are as this very unusual taskforce did.
Mr. McDaniel: Do you think now there’s a – we have a new president and there���s a – he seems to be promoting kind of a new era of nuclear power. Do you think the process that this committee went through is going to – the findings of it – to be beneficial to that new initiative?
Mrs. Peelle: They would be in my opinion but I don’t think there’s much chance. The problem – nuclear does have problems and hubris is one of them. I worked with Alvin Weinberg and Charles Forsberg at the lab in ’94 looking at the second nuclear era and it was my view then that they – unless the – I compared this with nuclear waste negotiations and negotiators in the other countries in the world that had them, Sweden, France. Let’s see, Bonneville Power is a good example of negotiations with the locals. If those techniques were used, and if the structure were such that local people – the problem is local people – for the siting – these big things – they bear the costs, but they may or may not get any of the benefits. I’ve often wondered if the TMI story would have been different if the utility there had been one of those that paid its way in local taxes, because not – depending on state law, some nuclear power plants do and others don’t. It makes a big difference.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. I’m sure. All right. Let’s kind of wrap things up a little bit with your interview. I think that’s important. You can talk a little bit about the – some of the social activities that you have as far as literacy and the Tabitha’s Table and the Martin Luther King Celebration Committee work if you can.
Mrs. Peelle: Okay. The –
Mr. McDaniel: Let me do something real quick before we start that. Just a moment.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: �� got there?
Mrs. Peelle: Well it’s interesting that this sort of reflection and probing is just happening now.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh yeah. Exactly.
Mrs. Peelle: It’s too bad that so many of the principals are gone.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh absolutely. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about those final issues.
Mrs. Peelle: One of my main concerns as a citizen over the years has been literacy and the lack of it in Tennessee. I think it’s very serious for our state and for all of us who live here that we’re – what – fourth from the bottom or something in the number of people at age twenty-six who have a high school degree as well as other things. As a member of the Altrusa Organization which is professional women and who have identified literacy as a main concern, I have been involved as the literacy person or the literacy – on the literacy committee for almost the whole time I’ve been there, which is twenty-some years. One of the first things I did on the – on the literacy committee was to work with the American Vision person who was – this was a – I forget her name as well as the government program she worked with. She was a volunteer for two years in Clinton and Oak Ridge and she worked on literacy. So in discussions with her and with the committee I set up through Altrusa and Willow Brook School, we got onto the value of an adult tutoring program for children who are not learning to read. It turns out that if a child is not reading well by fourth grade they’re more or less lost to our system, because as it turns out, the first three years or four if you have kindergarten in school are devoted to learning to read. After that, at grade four, you have to be able to read in order to learn. There are – we have especially at schools with the underprivileged, as at Willow Brook, which has – sixty-seven percent of the children there are on free lunch – many who are struggling, and it just cut me to the quick to learn that if more of the people than educators recognized the key importance of fourth grade in your skills at that level – but it’s the prison planners. They look at what the numbers are of who is reading and who isn’t. For the fraction that isn’t, they say, “Well this helps us plan the prison population facilities we’ll need in ten years.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Peelle: That’s right. So I was searching for some other handle for getting on this, and whereas the City of Oak Ridge already had half a dozen literacy programs and special things, the idea of adult tutors was the one that this person Debbie came up with and was implementing in Oak Ridge and in Clinton, I think. The idea of an adult tutor is the value for a child who is having difficulty in having once a week, half an hour visit with their own adult tutor. These are just ordinary people, grandparents. They often end up serving as substitute grandparents, substitute parents wherein, “You read to me, I’ll read to you. What’s going on in your life now?” Getting books that – this to my utter astonishment works for eighty percent of the children. Whatever problems they are having, parents are divorcing, they’re abused, they don’t have enough money, whatever. Whatever those problems are or abusive children, eighty percent of them can get over whatever that hump is and start – they learn to read. I thought, “My gosh, this ought to be – we ought to have as many tutors as they need.” So we picked – worked out with the Willow Brook principal at that time who was Craig – I’ll have to fill in all the names later – trying adult tutors. I signed up the first twenty-five people myself and had to go through a two hour orientation, which was just learning how to cooperate with the teachers, because you want the teachers to be requesting this. They have to give time out of class for students. Teachers have become its biggest proponent of – and then they meet their kid and oftentimes very close personal bonds are formed. It’s like – it’s the cheerleading function that, “You’re good and you’re an important enough person that I come and spend a half an hour time just for you.” I was just astounded. So I tried to get this number up of tutors. So it was working at Willow Brook, and we wanted to get some city funding for this. This was all volunteer and you need people who keep the records and run the operations and talk with the teachers and it has to be coordinated, which hour and which students. Other schools wanted it too, and we talked the city school system into funding a half-time coordinator. Then we advanced the program year by year to Woodland and to Glenview and Cedar Hill and our other four schools and it’s still working well, but we don’t have enough volunteers and I haven’t – it was down to seventy-five when I last checked in on it. I asked the coordinator, “Well, how many do you need?” She said, ���Oh we need a hundred. We always need more than we have because we have children who don’t have anybody to be tutored by.” So that is the reason I then have organized and served as the Chairman of the big literacy fundraising that we have here every year where Altrusa and Breakfast Rotary combine and coordinate, and we have fifty volunteers and we invite an author from outside and we talk about literacy, and we have big events and we pay money and we raise – when I – I did it three times, not necessarily in a row, and got – moved it from just money for GED for elders. I said, “We’ve got to have support for children,” because it often takes ten years for a very motivated adult to learn. It’s just so much harder.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure.
Mrs. Peelle: If you – let’s work on this. Now we supply tutors for down to first grade. Teachers are already saying, “Well this one is going to need a tutor.” So that’s just one of the things that I have felt is very important. We now use the proceeds from the literacy luncheon which are up to fourteen, fifteen thousand dollars, and we’ve gotten it organized into a program where people, other groups that can do something special in literacy can have a grant. They can apply for grants up to the fifteen thousand dollars that we raise.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well, talk a little bit about Tabitha’s Table.
Mrs. Peelle: Tabitha’s Table is one of the other things I’ve learned about and that is through my church. As the Social Action Chair at my church I heard about this feature. The Robertsville Baptist Church, it’s a good ecumenical program here, has been serving the – feeding and serving the hungry every Monday night for fifteen years, and it was always – but they – we learned about it because one of our volunteers when she was in graduate school for nursing had learned about it, and she just went over there on a Monday night to cook and learned that the whole thing was really running out of gas because there weren’t enough volunteers. It was originally Robertsville’s hope that each of the churches here would take a night and feed the hungry every night of the week, and that hasn’t happened. So we – this person, Livvy Clemons came back to our committee and said, “We need to fund and put up a team of Unitarians to take one of those nights and give the Baptists some rest,” and they really are – the Baptists are to be commended. They provide their church and they run the pantry and get the – do the paperwork to get some of the foods we can get from Second Harvest. So this is – and we’ve been doing this now for many years. Other churches joined, but then they come and go. Sometimes they send a few people. The First Methodists had a team and the Freewill Baptists have had a team, but it generally comes down now to the Baptists and the Unitarians and I still hope that there might be others who come. It’s very educational for both sides of the table when we serve a meal. We cook, deliver to shut-ins, serve, clean up all in the space of four or five hours, and most – no one but the cooks has to spend more than an hour. We now have two teams at our church, the red team and the blue team, so that they don’t have to do it every month.The demand has gone up. So it’s more than – when I left – I did the organization on a month by month basis at our church for seven or eight years and finally you need – everybody has burnout. I had other things I wanted to do. So we organized into two teams and four organizers. It’s going great guns, but the numbers have increased from forty or fifty to sixty, seventy. These are the working poor and the disabled and there are no questions asked. There’s no means test. Anyone may come who wants a meal. So that’s been one of my other specialties.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, well then let’s kind of finish up and talk about – you’ve been active in the Martin Luther King celebration here in Oak Ridge for a number of years.
Mrs. Peelle: I had not – after this humongous effort that we all made back in the ’50s and ’60s of trying to desegregate, it was always our hope that integration would follow at some later time. Of course there’s a big difference between desegregation and integration. So time went on and I was busy with other things and with work and I had twelve years of serious illness, chronic fatigue syndrome for seven and cancer for five. When I recovered from all that, I didn’t have cancer, and I didn’t have chronic fatigue anymore, either. So I have a lot of catch-up to do. So I’ve been noticing through the years though that the thing is that we were resegregating on many fronts and not liking that and not knowing just what if anything to do in the current era. But I was involved in a church seminar on racism in 1994 run by a black layperson from our Charleston, South Carolina church. At the end of that, he said, “I would like everybody to make a commitment for one thing that you will do.” What came out of it for me, I said, “I would like to work toward making Martin Luther King an American hero – perceived as an American hero, not just a black hero because in my view he is – much of his work and his teaching and his action is universal.” So in nineteen – that was in ’94 – in ’95, I went and volunteered for the Martin Luther King City Committee and found out that Anthony Allen, the originator of that, was suffering burnout, and the next year I managed to get Donna Mosby involved, and she and I remained – for many years, I was the only white person on the committee – and we put on this amazing set of programs in that week before and after Martin Luther King’s birthday on January 15th. There are regularly fourteen programs, which we only put on two or three of them, and I put on the personal testimonies program that I showed you the copy of. We have an interfaith church service and there is every – on alternate years, the black artists show for – juried show – is put on by the Art Center and other churches and groups and the hospital, schools put on programs. We coordinate that. We try to get people to tell us what they’re doing and publish news articles about that and a big poster that gives the whole schedule. So we’ve been doing that steadily.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. I think if the other citizens of Oak Ridge had been as active and influential in their community as you have been with – this wouldn’t be the same place.
Mrs. Peelle: Well it’s – this is an effort to translate my personal values into action and to try to do so, to learn the most effective ways of doing that and that helps you in revising and committing yourself to ways that work.
Mr. McDaniel: Well thank you very much. This has been enormously interesting and I appreciate you sharing your life with us.
Mrs. Peelle: I look forward to listening to some of the other videos because all the things I was involved with I was not – I was rarely a solo. Many, many other people were involved, especially on the desegregation stuff.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, thank you very much.
Mrs. Peelle: It’s been a pleasure to live in Oak Ridge because it was that sort of a place. We are hoping with Oak Ridge’s changes that there’ll be more involvement than the – because it’s been kind of dropping away, I think, with the aging of the – my cohort.
[end of recording]